Protocol Buffers For Mac

Protocol Buffers provides you a way of encoding structured data in an easy-to-use extensible format.

Google uses Protocol Buffers for almost all of its internal RPC protocols and file formats.

Protocol Buffers offers you a language-neutral, platform-neutral, extensible way of serializing structured data for use in communications protocols, data storage, and more.

This documentation is aimed at Java, C++, or Python developers who want to use protocol buffers in their applications.

Protocol buffers are a flexible, efficient, automated mechanism for serializing structured data – think XML, but smaller, faster, and simpler. You define how you want your data to be structured once, then you can use special generated source code to easily write and read your structured data to and from a variety of data streams and using a variety of languages.

You can even update your data structure without breaking deployed programs that are compiled against the "old" format.

You specify how you want the information you're serializing to be structured by defining protocol buffer message types in .proto files. Each protocol buffer message is a small logical record of information, containing a series of name-value pairs.